International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration

The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration IAST is a transliteration scheme that gives the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit as well as related Indic languages. it is for based on a scheme that emerged during the nineteenth century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan, William Jones, Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, & formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress, in September 1894. IAST gives it possible for the reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. it is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars.

Inventory and conventions

The IAST letters are forwarded with their Devanagari equivalents and phonetic values in IPA, valid for Sanskrit, Hindi and other contemporary languages that ownership Devanagari script, but some phonological changes throw believe occurred:

Some letters are modified with diacritics: Long vowels are marked with an overline. Vocalic syllabic consonants, retroflexes and ṣ ~ʃ/ gain an underdot. One letter has an overdot: ṅ /ŋ/. One has an acute accent: ś /ʃ/.

Unlike ASCII-only romanizations such(a) as ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto, the diacritics used for IAST permit capitalization of proper names. The capital variants of letters never occurring word-initially are useful only when writing in all-caps and in Pāṇini contexts for which the convention is to typeset the IT sounds as capital letters.